2004.10_Free Software Projects.pdf

COMMUNITY

Free Software Projects

Projects on the Move

As the range of Free software

increases so rapidly, you occasionally

might need a little help to make your

choice of what to use. We pick the

best of the bunch for you: Death to

the King with XBoard, the KDE

programm Akregator, Debian

GNU/KFreeBSD and the Debian vote

on the Social Contract.

BY MARTIN LOSCHWITZ

ing about what to call the 64 bit

AMD free software port for quite a

while now. AMD’s preferred version,

amd64 , and the x86_64 label from the

Linux kernel were the major contenders.

In the end, Debian’s technical commit-

tee, which has the final say, decided to

call the port amd64 , as this was the

name used during the development

phase [1].

The next topic: newspapers,

online magazines, and newstick-

ers all use so-called RSS feeds for

output. RSS is short for Rich Site

Summary. The format is defined

in XML, and combines the head-

line of an online article and a

link to that article in a single file.

The advantage is that you can

quickly check the RSS file, with-

out needing to search a whole

website.

ticker, the newsfeed of a daily newspa-

per, various BLOG entries, and perhaps

the newsfeeds for a few software pro-

jects. You would need a lot of time to

check all of them manually. RSS files in

XML format are not particularly useful in

themselves. They are hard to read on

account of the XML tags, and you need

to open the files to access the various

RSS feeds.

News Collector

Aggregators solve this problem by col-

lecting information from various RSS

feeds and showing the user only the

most important parts, that is the head-

line and the link. Akregator is an

aggregator tool. The tool is based on

KDE 3 and requires the KDE 3 base

libraries and programs. The version is

still pre-1.0, but the developers are work-

ing hard on getting there.

You can download the

program from [2] while

you are waiting for

Debian, Suse & co. to add

it to your distribution.

Users need to point the

program to a list of avail-

able RSS feeds – of course

it can handle several –

Akregator will process the

feeds and load the XML

file for each one. The left-

hand frame (see Figure 1)

shows the category to

which the list is assigned.

Use the drop-down menu

to open any RSS feed in

the list. After selecting an

Akregator

The time this saves is minimal

for a single news source, but this

changes if you have to check

multiple feeds: an online news-

Figure 1: Akregator, the convenient KDE front-end for reading multiple RSS

newsfeeds.

October 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

An up-to-date overview of free software and its makers

T he folks at Debian have been fight-

Free Software Projects

COMMUNITY

entry, you can view its contents, and

select a headline from there.

Clicking on View shows the URL for

the news item. One of Akregator’s spe-

cial features is that it does not launch an

instance of Konqueror, but instead opens

up a Konqueror tab in its own window.

This keeps the program lean, and avoids

cluttering up the desktop with too many

newsfeeds. Akregator integrates nicely

with the KDE desktop. It is similar to

pan , the GTK Usenet reader, and just as

easy to use. If you use KDE anyway, and

need to read a number of RSS feeds,

Akregator is definitely a program you

should check out.

distribution is the project’s most famous

product without a doubt, but Debian

builds distributions for other kernels too.

Debian GNU/Hurd [9] is a pre-compiled

software for the GNU operating system

kernel, and is approaching a version 1.0

release. A few years ago, a small group

of developers decided to port the Debian

software collection to FreeBSD [10].

That sounds easier than it actually

was. Debian is a complete, and fully

integrated system – replacing individual

elements can have unforeseen effects.

Debian System on a FreeBSD

Kernel

It quickly became apparent that the only

way to port Debian to FreeBSD would be

to port the whole thing. The only thing

left over of FreeBSD at the end of this

process would be the kernel, and a few

specialized tools for which there was no

Debian counterpart, such as the ipfw

packet filter. This is why the FreeBSD

port is now referred to as Debian

GNU/KFreeBSD, with the K standing for

kernel. The plan was to integrate the

FreeBSD kernel with the Debian user-

land tools, based on GNU tools and

FreeBSD’s own tools.

The first thing to be ported to the

FreeBSD kernel was the GNU Glibc, as it

is fairly easy to port any other Debian

packages, including dpkg – an elemen-

tary part of the Debian system, to the

FreeBSD kernel, once you have it run-

ning. Incidentally, another independent

project is porting Debian to FreeBSD, but

using the BSD Libc5 and thus risking

more far-reaching impact on the distrib-

ution.

Bruno Haible kicked off the develop-

ment work on GNU Glibc for FreeBSD.

XBoard

The battle between humans and

machines has never had such an avid

following as in chess show matches.

When ex-world champion Garry Kas-

parov took on IBM’s Deep Blue chess

computer in 1996, the story was all over

the headlines. Chess is one of the most

popular board games, because it is a

game of skill, rather than luck.

Of course, there are versions of the

Game of Kings for amateur players. You

do not need a machine like Deep Blue.

Fritz by Chessbase is probably one of the

best-known chess programs for Win-

dows; GNU Chess [3], and Crafty [4] are

two popular chess engines for Linux.

Both run without a GUI; players can

enter their moves via the console and the

program will output its own moves using

the same method.

XBoard [5] provides a GUI-based chess

front-end for various back-ends, includ-

ing GNU Chess and Crafty. The design of

the pieces conforms with official stan-

dards (see Figure 2). The program can

not completely do without the console in

the case of ICS online games. You need

to launch it in a terminal window and

supply various parameters.

XBoard has all the options you would

expect from a program of this kind. Play-

ers can choose colors, and modify the

display to reflect their preferences. You

can opt to display or hide the coordi-

nates, add sound-effects to moves, and

lots more. Of course, you can take back a

move. And if you want it to, the program

can also give you hints. XBoard supports

another game variant that uses the inte-

grated ICS protocol to battle it out with

Figure 2: The XBoard chess board at the start of a

game. You can play agaist the computer, but also

against opponents on the Internet thanks to a

special chess server.

other players on the Internet (see Fig. 3).

ICS allows players looking for an oppo-

nent to connect to a server, and indicate

what color they will be playing with, and

what level of skill they think they have.

The server looks for suitable opponents

based on these criteria. As an alterna-

tive, you can check out other people’s

criteria, and select an opponent who

looks likely to match your skill level. The

program even allows you to arrange

dates for online matches.

There are quite a few open IC servers,

including chessclub.com [6], where

guests can play free of charge. This said,

you need to be a registered member

(with your own nick) to use some of the

server’s special features, and that will

set you back about US$ 50 a year.

Freechess.org [7] has an alternative. You

can register for free and access all the

features for free too.

If you fancy the idea of run-

ning a chess server on your own

LAN, try Timeseal. You can

download the program, includ-

ing a description and installation

guide at [8]. Incidentally, GNU

Chess also supports automated

chess on a local chess server.

Check out the GNU Chess docu-

mentation for details.

Debian GNU/KFreeBSD

The Debian project for free soft-

ware is often confused with

Debian GNU/Linux. The Linux

Figure 3: The XBoard console controls the communication

with the Internet Chess Server.

www.linux-magazine.com

October 2004

COMMUNITY

Free Software Projects

This move was followed by the

Glibc BSD Project on the GNU

project server, Savannah. This

is where the code for GNU/

KFreeBSD is being maintained,

until it finds its way into the

official GNU Glibc sources.

It took the GNU/KFreeBSD

developers a while to come up

with initial results, but the sys-

tem is now capable of booting

and fulfilling simple tasks (see

Figure 4). They have a shell running, so

the system will accept commands. If you

install GNU/KFreeBSD, you will discover

that it has a few important packages,

such as build-essential and xfree86 . The

build-essential package describes the

packages required to compile other pack-

ages, which include GCC, the GNU Glibc

header files and the binutils.

Figure 4: QED: A special patched version of grub booting a FreeBSD ker-

nel, which then launches the GNU/KFreeBSD system.

majority decision by all Debian

developers.

As more and more proposals

kept coming in, there was no

alternative, but to keep on post-

poning the vote. Finally, after

accepting six proposals, it was

agreed that enough was enough,

and that no more proposals

would be listened to. When vot-

ing closed on June 2 the results

were surprisingly clear. An over-

whelming majority of voters came down

in favor of revoking the changes to the

Social Contract, and re-applying them

after the Sarge release. The turnout was

depressingly small: Of 909 eligible vot-

ers, less than 400 actually cast their vote.

The details of the vote are at [13].

that a free software needs to fulfill.

In his role as the Debian Release Man-

ager, Anthony Towns suggested using a

loophole in the Social Contract to post-

pone the debate until after the release of

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (aka Sarge). At

this time, the Social Contract had a pas-

sage stating that Debian should contain

only “free software”. Besides the kernel

drivers, the issue also affected documen-

tation released under the GNU Free

Document License.

Anthony’s idea was not to count

firmware and documentation as software

to provide at least a temporary work-

around. This was doomed to failure

when Andrew Suffield suggested an

ostensibly harmless editorial change to

the Social Contract, which was accepted

by a majority decision. What happened

was that the editorial changes replaced

the word “software” with “works”, thus

harpooning Anthony’s workaround.

It soon became apparent that the

change could turn into a major obstacle

to the Sarge release. Debian can not

afford any more delays. Woody is

becoming more and more obsolete, and

may still be acceptable for server

machines, but not for desktop use. Thus,

the changes either had to go, or be post-

poned until after the Sarge release.

That’s all folks…

… for this month at least, but we do

have one request before we go: If you

can recommend a program that you

would like to see featured in Projects on

the Move , why not mail me with your

suggestion [14]? I look forward to your

comments!

Volunteer Builders Sought

The project is looking for people to build

new packages for Debian GNU/

KFreeBSD. There is even a ready-made

solution for programs that use the GNU

Autotools. See the GNU/KFreeBSD port

website at [11] for a description.

On June 30, Robert Millan, one of the

main developers of Debian GNU/

KFreeBSD, revealed a milestone [12]. A

Live CD, in the style of Knoppix, which

users can run without installing. They

hope to achieve two aims with the Live

CD: to make it easier (or even possible)

for developers to contribute, and to

attract public interest, and more volun-

teers who can further the development

of Debian GNU/KFreeBSD.

The project has a long way to go

before the system can be put into pro-

duction use, but things do look

promising and Debian GNU/KFreeBSD

might become an alternative to the plain

vanilla FreeBSD, as soon as it is inte-

grated into the Debian infrastructure (the

operative word being security updates).

■

INFO

[1] Technical Committee decision:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2004/

06/msg00115.html

[2] Akregator: http://akregator.sf.net

[3] GNU Chess:

http://www.gnu.org/software/chess/

[4] Crafty: http://www.limunltd.com/crafty/

[5] XBoard:

http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html

[6] ICS Chessclub website:

http://www.chessclub.com

[7] ICS Freechess: http://www.freechess.org

[8] Timeseal: http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/

~chess/soft/timeseal/

[9] Debian GNU/Hurd:

http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

[10] FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/

[11] GNU/KFreeBSD: http://www.debian.org/

ports/freebsd/gnu-libc-based

[12] Announcement by Robert Millan:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/

2004/06/msg01617.html

[13] Information on SC vote: http://www.

debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004

[14] Tips and suggestions:

projects@linux-magazine.com

Protracted Talks

That turned out to be easier said than

done. Debian’s rules stipulate a general

resolution for changes to the Social

Contract. A general resolution needs

several sponsors, and a three quarter

Debian & the Social Contract

In last month’s issue, we looked in some

detail at the hullabaloo surrounding the

Social Contract at the Debian Project.

The reason for this was that many devel-

opers do not think that some drivers in

the Linux kernel comply with the Debian

Free Software Guidelines. In the Guide-

lines, the project describes the criteria

Martin Loschwitz is from a small Ger-

man town called Niederkrüchten and

a developer for Debian GNU/Linux.

Martin’s leisure time is mainly pre-

occupied with activities in the Debian

or GNU community.

October 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

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